Sunday, January 12, 2014

The Maps of the Week

A new map from the New York Times uses data from the Census Bureau to
show the percentages of people living below the poverty line in each
census tract in the USA. The Mapping Poverty in America
visualization uses the Google Maps API to provide poverty percentage
rates and the numbers living in poverty in each USA census tract.

You can zoom in on the map to view the poverty levels at any location or
you can use the links under the map to quickly zoom to a number of the
larger US cities.

Thanks to ProPublica we now have a Google Map that allows you to find
nearby emergency rooms and find out which has the shortest average
waiting time. The ER Wait Watcher
lets you search for any address in the United States and visualize all
nearby emergency rooms. Not only does it show you all your nearby
emergency rooms but it displays the average waiting times and tells you
how long it will take to get there from your current location.

The Mozilla Location Service provides geolocation data based on cell
tower and WiFi access point information. Mobile phones with a weak GPS
signal and laptops without GPS hardware can use the service to quickly
identify an approximate location.

You can see where the service is available on the new Mozilla Location Service Coverage Map. The map was created with MapBox and uses a dark variation of Mozilla’s custom maps,
using Mozilla's typography for the map labels. A pretty neat feature of
the map is how the labels are layered on top of the blue data points so
that users can still easily navigate the map.